If we all pattern our behavior after the worst examples available to us then all is truly lost.

Monday, October 24, 2011

Fat Ladies, Promises and Iraq

25 October 2011

By Jeff Huber

Please don’t be duped into thinking that young Mr.
Obama’s “troops
will be home for the holidays” announcement last Friday really means that the
proverbial plump soprano has crooned the coda of our Wagnerian Iliad in Iraq:
the troops’ journey home is likely to resemble the one in The Odyssey that dragged on for ten years or so after the Trojan War ended. Also don’t fall
into the perception traps that might lead you to think Obama is beginning to
keep his last set of campaign promises just in time to cook up some new ones,
or that he’s finally gotten control of his New Praetorian Generals or of the
New Centurion Pentarchy.

And whatever you do, don’t buy the lysergic
assertion that Obama’s announcement heralds the beginning of the end of our Long
War aka Era of Persistent
Conflict aka the Global War on Terrorism (aka GWOT) aka the Global Struggle
Against Violent Extremism (aka GSAVE)
War on Evil (aka WOE). No, Americans
will still be consuming pro-war bull feather merchandising when Gen Y is
puling like a herd of kittens about Gen Z’s reluctance to buy into
Social Security and Public Health Care.

CIA Director Petraeus was just kidding
back when he said he'd get us
out of Iraq (hah!).

It’s worth noting that Mr. O didn’t specify which holidays of which year the troops would be home from Iraq by. One doesn't like to think that our wartime
leaders would play us with that level of weasel wordplay, but you never
know. Obama might be following the
successful example of his fair-haired step-general Dave
Petraeus who, back in summer of 2007, told the House Foreign Affairs
Committee that his objective as Supreme Sultan of the Surgin’ Safari in Sumaria
was to create “conditions that would allow our soldiers to disengage." King David didn't say if he was aiming to
allow out soldiers to disengage in this American Century
or the next one. We know from Petraeus consecrator
and camp concubine Thomas
E. Ricks that the general’s real intention was “not to bring the war to a
close” but to con the American people into sticking with it even longer.

Here we are four years and lunch money after the surge with an Iraq that’s as up for grabs as it ever was, and John Boehner is
expressing concerns that a full withdrawal from Iraq could “jeopardize” the
“gains” we’ve achieved. Holy mackerel,
Sapphire. Where do we find such tanning bed bimbos? That’s like Jonah worrying
if the whale can get by on an empty stomach.

Obama’s “withdrawal” from Iraq doesn't just leave
the back door open; it leaves the front of the building blown off. There’s still a “possibility” that we’ll
leave an unspecified number of “trainers” behind to “advise” Iraqi troops. Military advisers have a way of making like
bunnies, folks. We didn’t end the
Vietnam War by putting advisers in country.
That’s how we started the
Vietnam War. There will also, of course
be a Marine security contingent at our embassy in Baghdad. That’s standard procedure in the capitol of
every nation that still sucks up to us.

What’s not standard procedure about our embassy in
Baghdad—a compound the size of Vatican City that looks like the fortress in The Guns of
Navarone—is that in addition to the Marines it will also be infested by
what Mark Landler of the New York Times describes as “4,000 to 5,000 private State
Department security contractors”(aka Blackwater
hoodlums) “as well as a significant
[my italics] CIA presence.” You start
adding on the soldiers of ill-gotten fortune that Exxon and Halliburton and KBR
and the rest of the war buckaroos will bring with them and pretty soon you’re
talking about a force the equivalent of a U.S. Army division (the embassy
mercenary corps alone is brigade size).

Lawyers, Guns and Hillary

The “advisers” will be special force phantoms who,
along with the CIA spooks, operate outside of any chain of
command you can define with a wire diagram. The mercenaries, once they’re
abroad, run amok unrestrained by any written or unwritten laws of God or
man. The only authority they’re
concerned about is the one that signs their paychecks, who in this case is our
warmongering Secretary of State. Cruella
Clinton can now commit our nation to war without the consent of Congress or the
judiciary or even the commander in chief whenever she gets the notion, which puts her on equal footing with
our UN
Ambassador Susie Rice, who started our whackadoodle-do in Libya by carping
the Security Council into passing a bombs-away resolution.

No, the fat lady isn’t singing in Iraq. She hasn’t even sprayed her throat yet.

Claims that Obama’s non-withdrawal
announcement show he’s living up to campaign promises to shut the Iraq WOE down are as legitimate as blue
money. The deadline to haul heinie out
of Iraq at the end of this year was in the status of forces agreement the Bush regime signed onto when the UN mandate ran out. Obama is semi-bringing
the troops home because his Pentarchs couldn’t bully the Iraqi government into
granting indefinite legal immunity to whatever troops we decided to leave
behind. If an agreement to leave troops
in place had been reached, Obama would have gone slut-puppy for it just like
he’s done with everything else his velvet junta generals have ordered him to
do.

We've got to drop all those leftover bombs on somebody!

In no way have the Pentagon brass hats given up on
maintaining a permanent presence in Iraq.
Senior sanctioned leakers are feeding the Tom Ricks wannabe echo
chamberlains tag lines about how we'll have to get by with a “smaller
footprint” to administer “training” and “guidance,” and to provide Iraq with
air defense from, uh, the Kurdish Air Force, I guess. But, hey, you know, if we leave people
behind to do that stuff we’ll need additional security personnel to protect
them, and we’ll need additional support personnel to cook food and make beds
and fix stopped up toilets for the additional security personnel, and then
we’ll need extra additional security personnel to provide security for the
additional security personnel’s additional support personnel, and then we’ll
need extra additional support personnel to support the extra additional security personnel, and so on and so on and so on.

But aside from that, everybody is coming home.

With Moammar "The Ram" Gadhafi
gone, who's next?

Any talk that Obama’s homecoming address is another
sign that he’s reining in our warhorses is pure reconstituted horse
lunch. We no sooner get done having
those images of Moammar Gadhafi looking like Mickey Roark at the end of The Wrestler jammed in our eyes like pencils than Pops
McCain starts howling about how now we can start bombing the living Christ
our Lord and Savior out of Syria!

Remember thinking the warmongery was kaput when McCain lost the election?

Hearing President Barack Obama promise – again – that all remaining American military forces would (after almost eight years) leave Iraq within the next two months, I recalled something that George Orwell wrote in his essay entitled, Catastrophic Gradualism:

"There is a theory which has not yet been accurately formulated or given a name, but which is very widely accepted and is brought forward whenever it is necessary to justify some action which conflicts with the sense of decency of the average human being. It might be called, until some better name is found, the Theory of Catastrophic Gradualism. According to this theory, nothing is ever achieved without bloodshed, lies, tyranny and injustice, but on the other hand no considerable change for the better is to be expected as the result of even the greatest upheaval. History necessarily proceeds by calamities, but each succeeding age will be as bad, or nearly as bad as the last. ...

"The formula usually employed is 'You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.' And if one replies, 'Yes, but where is the omelet?' the answer is likely to be: 'Oh, well, you can't expect everything to happen all in a moment.'"Hence, a few lines of verse:

"After the Banquet in Baghdad”

With their tails tucked proudly 'tween their legsAdvancing towards the exit march the dregsOf empire, whose retreat this question begs:No promised omelet, just the broken eggs?

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (retired) was a naval flight officer who commanded an aircraft squadron and was operations officer of USS Theodore Roosevelt, the carrier that fought the Kosovo War. He earned a master-of-arts degree in post-modern imperialism at the U.S. Naval War College where many of his essays became required student reading. Jeff’s weekly satires on U.S. foreign policy high jinks appear at Antiwar.com and his critically applauded novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now. Jeff lives with dogs in a house by the beach on Chesapeake Bay in Virginia, and in the summer he has a nice tan.